Call Your Representatives.
5CALLS
Experts recommend calling, rather than emailing, our representatives about issues we care about.
Representatives’ assistants log each call.
You can call after hours—even during the night—if that’s when you have the time. Voicemails are tallied just like calls. (Make sure to leave your street address & zip code.)
But what makes a particular type of message effective depends largely on what you are trying to achieve. For mass protests, such as those that have been happening recently, phone calls are a better way of contacting lawmakers, not because they get taken more seriously but because they take up more time—thereby occupying staff, obstructing business as usual, and attracting media attention. E-mails get the message through but are comparatively swift and easy for staffers to process, while conventional mail is at a disadvantage when speed matters, since, in addition to the time spent in transit, anything sent to Congress is temporarily held for testing and decontamination, to protect employees from mail bombs and toxins. Afterward, most constituent mail is scanned and forwarded to congressional offices as an electronic image. In other words, your letter will not arrive overnight, and it will not arrive with those grains of Iowa wheat or eau de constituent you put in it. But, once it shows up, it will be taken at least as seriously as a call.
phone calls that hew to scripts from advocacy organizations usually get downgraded, especially if the caller seems ill-informed about the issue. Such calls also tend to annoy staffers.
For constituent activity to have more immediate effects on the actions of lawmakers, however, other conditions—most of them necessary, none of them necessarily sufficient—must apply. Broadly speaking, these include a huge quantity of people acting in concert, an unusually high pitch of passion, a specific countervailing vision, and consistent press coverage unfavorable to sitting politicians. Together, these can create the most potent condition of all: the possibility (or, at any rate, the fear) that the collective restiveness could jeopardize reëlection.
Such conditions do not emerge very often in American politics, but, when they do, pundits routinely describe them with recourse to the metaphor of a flood. Calls pour in; dams threaten to burst; legislators are deluged, inundated, swamped.
I asked Carter Moore how he might quantify a flood. “If you start seeing tweets or Facebook posts saying, ‘Tried to call but got a busy signal,’ that’s one sign,” he said. “If everybody in your office has been pulled off their regular duties to answer calls but the line is still clogged, that’s usually a sign, too.” In terms of actual call volume, he noted that flood levels depend, as they do in real life, on terrain; at baseline, representatives of populous districts with major media centers get more calls than those from Idaho or Wyoming. “Still, if the calls are coming in at forty an hour,” Moore said, “something interesting is happening. If a member of Congress is presented at the end of the day with around six hundred to a thousand unique calls, I’d call that a flood.”
******The deluge of constituent pressure, by contrast, is a viable long-term strategy, but only if it is a long-term strategy—that is, only if those doing it choose to sustain it. That would mean persevering in the face of both short-term defeats and the potentially energy-sapping influence of time itself.
Such perseverance is by no means impossible; here, too, political causality is complex. Setbacks can as easily stoke as sap, movements may grow as well as wither, and every critical mass has, of necessity, been built from a subcritical one. Moreover, and luckily for democracy, none of us requires a guaranteed outcome in order to act. We all do plenty of things without knowing if or when or how or how much they will work: we say prayers, take multivitamins, give money to someone on Second Avenue who looks like she needs it. So, too, with calling and e-mailing and writing and showing up in congressional offices: it would be good to know that these actions will succeed, but it suffices to know that they could. And at this particular moment, when our First Amendment freedoms are existentially threatened—when the President himself has, among other things, sought to curb press access and to discredit dissent—we also act on them to insist that we can. The telephone might not be a superior medium for participatory democracy, but it is an excellent metaphor for it, and it reminds us of the rights we are promised as citizens. When we get disconnected, we can try to get through. When we get no answer, we can keep trying. When we have to, for as long as we need to, we can hold the line.
What Calling Congress Achieves, Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, 26 February 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/what-calling-congress-achieves
Ultimately, everyone agrees that for all the chaos it causes, there's real power in a phone call—in the people's ability to burst into the day of their elected representatives. "If your phone's ringing off the hook all day long, that's pretty memorable," [Kris] Miler says. She's seen Congressional debates center on the phone onslaught in a representative's office, and found that a legislator's understanding of their district was remarkably linked to who they'd talked to recently. Even in the last couple of weeks, the ever-ringing phone has changed legislators' minds about what the American people want. So, yeah, phone calls are sort of awkward and hammering away at a busy signal sucks. And Congress needs to figure out how to hear and speak to its citizens more clearly. But your voice does matter. And so does your voicemail.
David Pierce,Wired, 3 February 2017. https://www.wired.com/2017/02/call-congress-phone-system-broken/